Michael Salcman, poet, physician and art historian, was born in Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, came to the United States in 1949 and trained in neurosurgery at Columbia University. Formerly chair of neurosurgery at the University of Maryland and president of the Contemporary Museum in Baltimore, he is the author of six medical textbooks and eight previous collections of poems, including The Clock Made of Confetti, nominated for the Poets Prize, The Enemy of Good is Better, and A Prague Spring, Before & After, winner of the 2015 Sinclair Poetry Prize. He edited Poetry in Medicine, a standard anthology of classic and contemporary poems about doctors, patients, illness and healing. His poems appear in prominent journals including Arts & Letters, The Café Review, Harvard Review, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, New Letters, Notre Dame Review, Poet Lore and Raritan. His previous collection, Shades & Graces: New Poems, was the inaugural winner of the Daniel Hoffman Legacy Book Prize in 2020.
